A half-dozen years ago, I remember when the file manager in the default Ubuntu desktop (back when it was a desktop, and not a smartphone screen) could preview audio files with a mouseover.
Everybody thought that was mega-cool, and great things were predicted for the future of Ubuntu. Whether or not that prediction came true is a matter of personal opinion.
Short of some meta-terminals that do mouseover previews, AudioPreview might be your best bet for similar behavior, at the command line.
Your first instinct might be to ask, “Is it really necessary to have an entire application dedicate to playing a random 10-second preview of an audio track? Especially when there are command-line players dedicated to each format?”
I suppose that’s viable criticism. Even an unrelated command-line player — maybe even something like alsaplayer or mplayer, whose command-line interfaces are more like afterthoughts — could work.
And then you’d ask, “And why do I need to load on even more dependencies for this, when those other players are ready to go?”
I suppose that’s fair too. Depending on what audio you’re previewing, you’ll need variations on the gstreamer collection to preview them.
And I have no rebuttal; you’d do better either debating that yourself, or asking the author.
I can see where this might be useful if you have a lot of audio tracks to skim through though, and you don’t want the hassle of cueing up each one.
(The example comes to mind of a family member’s iPod, which dumped all its contents into a single folder with scrambled file names. Completely unhelpful. But that’s an iPod for you.)
And hey, this has color. That’s cool.